To the Jewish people, Pessah, or Passover, is a celebration of freedom from bondage, of independence as established by God, symbolically, spiritually, and in specific terms freedom from the oppression they had suffered in Egypt: "Pessah is the Independence Day of the Jewish people, when God gave the people their freedom in order that they might have the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of duty" (Trepp, 1973, 206).
Passover is especially significant to the Jewish people because it has so many meanings---rebirth in freedom from bondage, a sign of the pact between God and the people, and "the festival of freedom, the festival of Spring which marks the onset of harvest time in the Holy Land. . . . It is the festival of creation; nature and man are reborn" (Trepp, 1973, 206).
The time of imprisonment and suffering in Egypt was a terrible one for the Jewish people, a time in which there was much despair. It was not the despair and suffering of one person, however, as Trepp points out, but of the whole of the Jewish people. The event of liberation which the Passover's seven days of Seders celebrate is not a triumph of one Jew over an enemy, as with David over Goliath, but was rather a victory, bestowed by God, of the whole Jewish people: "In Judaism it is the resurrection not of One Person but of the People, for in Judaism it is the community which gives meaning to individual lives" (Trepp, 1973, 207).
Passover focuses on the Seders, or the ceremonial evening meals of Passover week, during which the story of the Jews' Exodus from bondage on Egypt is recited. The meals focus on unleavened bread, or matzoth, which is all the Jewish people had time to prepare as they suddenly were saved by God from Egyptian bondage.
Clearly, Passover is most important because it is such a powerful example of the special pact between God and the Jewish people. The Jewish people were completely powerless in bondage to a powerfu...