Keriat haTorah therefore means not reading, but proclaiming the Torah, reading it aloud. The one who reads it has the written word in front of him, but for the rest of the gathering it is an experience not of the eye, but of the ear. The divine word is something heard rather than seen. Indeed, it was only with the spread of manuscripts, and the invention of printing in the fifteenth century, that reading become a visual rather than auditory experience. To this day the primary experience of keriat haTorah involves listening to the reader declaim the words from the Torah scroll, rather than following them in a printed book. We miss some of the most subtle effects of Torah if we think of it as the text seen, rather than the word heard.