As someone who educated himself as a Jew in adulthood, the beauty of matza is its metaphoric representation of humility. Leavening represents ego rising and avo

As someone who educated himself as a Jew in adulthood, the beauty of matza is its metaphoric representation of humility. Leavening represents ego rising and avoiding it for the 8 days of passover is a physical reminder of humility. Prior to passover, we do a careful search of our household to find and remove leavened bread, even small bits. This is analogous to soul-searching for things within us where ego dominates and gets in the way of the kind of people we want to be. The symbolism of finding and taking the effort to remove these traces (or large chunks) of ego is powerful, and passover is a great periodic reminder to take this kind of inner inventory. And then on the physical level, and still related to ego, I think there's a lot of little "addictions" that we have as people. "I can't live w/o a muffin in the morning" or whatever is pretty benign as far as addictions go, but even the difficulty of giving that up shows how much of our behavior is ruled by little irrelevant things in the world. And then our ability to get over that and just eat matzo for 8 days proves to ourselves that we can ultimately overcome these addictions that they don't matter. A modern version of that might be "for 8 days, you can only use a feature phone, no touchscreen devices!" :) Now that I said all of this, I have to fess up that I love the crunchiness of Matza which I for the first time tasted around age 9 when the Soviet Union was opening up and someone brought us Matza from the US. It was literally my first "taste" of religion. EDIT: to tie it together - passover is a holiday about freedom. On the literal level, exodus from slavery. On the metaphorical level, liberation from ego-domination and unconscious subjugation to the world instead of making active choices. Your ability to chose to just eat matza for 8 days is an assertion of your freedom over that. Your ego, and the world, would rather you load up on bagels - but you are somehow finding within yourself to forego that because of higher aspiration (even if that aspiration is merely to continue traditions of your ancestors) - and that is amazing and powerful in and of itself.