As Jews around the world prepare for the annual Shavuot festival marking the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, for many of our brothers and sisters, involvement in Judaism is an endeavor that takes place on a distant planet, one which they have neither the inclination nor the inspiration to visit. Seen as an archaic remnant of a prehistoric culture, Torah is a curiosity at best and, at worst, an oppressive reminder of the days before modernity “enlightened” us all. In this version, only the secular is holy.

It seems difficult in such a landscape to internalize that Judaism is the inheritance of the entire Jewish people. In his seminal essay “Revelation in the Jewish Tradition”, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas writes that the Revelation calls to that which is singular in each of us, “as if every person, through his uniqueness, were the guarantee of the revelation of a unique aspect of truth, and some of its points would never have been revealed if some people had been absent from humankind.”

As much as we need Jewish texts to enrich us, those books need each of us to expose some dimension that would have remained hidden, like a house with an endless number of locked doors, requiring each and every one of us to spring one open with our own custom set of keys.

In A Letter in the Scroll, the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks reflected on a teaching of the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, known as the Baal Shem Tov. Rabbi Israel’s idea was that every Jew constituted a letter in a national Sefer Torah, the history and heritage of the Jewish people.

As Rabbi Sacks notes, the metaphor of the letter in the scroll is that of our identity at the crossroads:

“We can live for work or success or fame or power. We can have a whole series of lifestyles and relationships. We can explore any of a myriad of faiths, mysticisms, or therapies. There is only one constraint–namely, that however much of anything else we have, we have only one life, and it is short. How we live and what we live for are the most fateful decisions we ever make. We can see life as a succession of moments spent, like coins, in return for pleasures of various kinds. Or we can see our life as though it were a letter of the alphabet. A letter on its own has no meaning, yet when letters are joined to others they make a word, words combine with others to make a sentence, sentences connect to make a paragraph, and paragraphs join to make a story.”

Do we, today, wish to be one of those letters, to not only be a part of but also enhance the Jewish future?

The phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” was first coined, in slightly different form, by the Greek philosopher Aristotle. In everyday life, the phrase signifies that often, when we combine our mutual efforts, we achieve something far beyond what each of us could do with the same number of separate individuals.

For instance, one of the main principles of adult learning is that mature students have a lifetime of knowledge that they bring to the classroom experience. And any teacher who treats them like kids is in for a rude awakening. In many cases, the only thing the teacher knows more about than “the learners” is the subject being taught. And what students know can add an enormous dimension to whatever it is you are trying to communicate.

So whether your class is made up of doctors, lawyers, farmers, athletes, punk rockers, actuaries, plumbers, hairdressers or stay at home moms and dads, what they share about what have learned and experienced over a lifetime, and how others present then respond and take the conversation further, is often the key ingredient that can create an unforgettable class. What is true of education is also true of Judaism as a whole, which benefits from a range of voices and interpretations. The effect transcends any one person or point of view.

One of the defining concepts of the modern world is the increased competence of supposed “lay people” to meaningfully contribute to discourse in a variety of areas, including religion. It is not an accident, that with the invention of the printing press in 1453, comes a gradual revolution in the relationship of the ordinary person to the Bible and hence to religious teachings. With increased availability of books and the rise in the average literacy rate—consider that literacy was about 10% of the population in the Roman Empire—many more people are now competent to add their voice to Jewish discussions. And despite its well-publicized drawbacks, the Internet has also allowed Jews around the world the possibility of entering the universe of Jewish knowledge. There has never been a better time to add your voice to the conversation, whatever your vision of being Jewish.

In the end, the time is short and the decisions we make, or perhaps more importantly, do not make, are fateful for us and our descendants. Judaism will march on, with or without us, but it will certainly end up a much better book, if we can include more diverse and universal letters.