Nitzavim-Vayelech

Mark is the Senior Rabbi at North Western Reform Synagogue.

"Assemble the people - men, women and children, and the strangers in your cities - to hear, and learn to revere the Eternal One, your God, and observe faithfully all the precepts of this Torah." (Deuteronomy 31:11-12)

Among Moses' last words he commanded the religious leadership of his time never to keep our teaching to themselves. Rather they were to assemble all of the people irrespective of age or gender to enable them to hear the Torah, at least every seven years at Sukkot - a tradition which is the direct antecedent of our weekly torah reading. And not only were they to hear: the people were to study, so that they could put the torah into action. The Sefer Torah was then, as the portion continues, placed into the Ark of the Covenant to serve as a matter of record. But, according to Midrash (which expands upon the Torah account), Moses then went on to make eleven further copies of the Torah so that the Levites who had control of the Ark of the Covenant could not keep it to themselves - but rather each tribe could make message of the Torah available to all who wanted to consult it.

Having enshrined in the Torah the message that all Jews should be enabled to have access to our teachings, Jews continued to be inventive in how that message was spread. For example, when the Rabbis of old held their discussions they kept with them a special professional called a meturgeman. The task of this person was to act like a combination between a dictating machine and an encyclopaedia. He would have trained his memory to remember his rabbi's words for passing on into the future and would also be on hand to provide quotations from other rabbis and previous sources in order to further a discussion.

Jewish publishers invented the first book with hyperlinks - the sixteenth century editions of the Talmud. In the groundbreaking Vilna edition, a unique page layout, still used four hundred years later, links the reader with comments on every passage that he or she is studying from subsequent authorities, to biblical passages and to digests of laws on derived from the discussions on the basic page.

For many of us our level of literacy in Jewish sources just isn't high enough to be able to meaningfully engage in the holy debate that they are intended to inspire. So we organise ourselves to hear their message presented and distilled for us and we return to the power of personal communication hearing from teachers and Rabbis. There is a healthy tendency now among committed Jews of all shades to want to participate in Chavrutah schemes where two people learn at their own pace by studying texts together with or without a facilitator to help them to make sense of difficulties.

Even so we should not underestimate the power of one person speaking to another. A local doctor I know told me that in times of national tragedy, the 9/11 and 7/7 attacks having been cases in point, he saw fewer patients than normal. It seemed to him that many of the people who report physical symptoms to him, in the search for human contact from someone who cares, didn't need him - their families had, presumably driven by the tragic events, picked up the phone to them or come to visit. So too at this time of teshuvah, repentance, any efforts that we make to speak to those whom we have lost contact with will be especially worthwhile, particularly if we are contacting them to apologise for a wrong we might have done them. Let us not live to regret the message that we never gave.