This used to be in the section in chapter 8 about how the Mishnah and the Talmud came into being after the Jewish people had scattered all over the world and they wanted to keep track of the oral law so they wrote it down.
Which meant that by now the oral Torah, originally intended to clear up any confusion, was irrevocably a source of dispute, disagreement, and question, because as long as an opinion was part of the dialogue, it was considered a valid perspective on the issue at hand.
The obvious response was to write down all the arguments about the text and publish them, which started happening a few centuries later—this was called the Talmud—and then people started arguing about the arguments and writing that down, and so on and so forth until Europe started letting Jews into regular society in the middle of the nineteenth century or so, at which point, in the rabbis’ view, everything began to fall apart. It started small—the Lord’s name taken in vain here, a father or mother dishonored there—but before too long, men were snipping off their sidelocks, women were removing their wigs, and parents had to walk their kids to school to protect them from the bad element in the neighborhood, which could be identified by their bowler hats. Eventually the rabbis felt they had no choice but to freeze everything as a preservative measure, and that’s what we’ve had ever since.
But the legacy of all those disagreements has remained. It’s said—heaven only knows who by, I read it kneeling in an aisle at the Strand used bookstore (“18 miles of books!”) and forgot to make a note and of course have never been able to find it again—that God listens to the debates of the scholars to learn the proper interpretation of the Law. It’s also said (this I saw several times so I don’t know who to credit) that the Torah is written in black fire on white fire: what isn’t said is as important as what is said, if not more so.
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