Why was it necessary to have an oral law? Couldn't we have avoided inaccuracies and machlokot in the mishnah, gemara and etc by writing it down originally?
Answer
The Rambam in Moreh Nevochim 1:71 addresses this question. The Rambam actually says that the opposite is true - the integrity of the Oral law was preserved specifically by it's being oral. The Rambam writes as follows (קאפח edition):
וכבר ידעת כי אפילו תורה שבע"פ המקובלת לא היתה כתובה לפנים, כפי הצווי המפורסם באומה "דברים שאמרתי לך על פה אי אתה רשאי לאמרם בכתב", והרי זו היא תכלית החכמה בתורה, לפי שהיתה הרחקה ממה שאירע בה בסופו של דבר, כלומר רבוי הסברות והסתעפות השטות, ומשפטים בלתי ברורים שיארעו בהסברת המחבר, ושכחה שתארע לו, ויתחדשו מחלוקות בין בני אדם ונעשים כתות ונבוכים במעשה. אלא נמסר בכל זה לבית דין הגדול
(My rough translation) : Of course you are aware that even the Oral Torah which we have received was not originally written down, according to the accepted command "that which I have said to you orally you are not allowed to say in writing," and this is the epitome of wisdom by the Torah, as it serves to fend off that which eventually ended up happening, namely abundance of [conflicting] lines of reasoning and branching off of opinions, unclear statements through the explanatory skills and forgetfulness of the author, and disagreements arise and they become splintered groups, and what should be done becomes unclear. Rather, the entire system was given over to the Great Court.
As R' Yaakov Weinberg explained, a role of the Sanhedrin, as custodians of the Oral Law, was to explain it to the contemporary generation. Oral Law was specifically meant to be communicated in modern parlance, with examples that were clear to the person to whom they were being given. Oral Law was specifically not meant to be codified into static passages which would not have the same meaning in different cultures and periods. The system of Oral transmission forced that the Torah was given over in contemporary terms, face to face with a live person who would explain it in a way that you understood it.
It was only when this system broke down, and the ability to maintain the actual body of knowledge became impractical, that the risk of losing the content of the Oral Law overrode the method that guaranteed its clarity of transmission. This led to the current system, in which set-in-stone phrases become subject to the debate of their meaning, and different paths of reasoning in order to make sense of unclear statements emerge.
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