Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 64, preserves one of the cleverest moments in rabbinic history. Rabbi Akiva was imprisoned — a fate he would eventually die in — and his student Rabbi Johanan ben Nuri needed an urgent ruling. Approaching the prison as a rabbi would draw Roman attention. Silence would not serve. So he improvised.
Johanan disguised himself as a peddler. He loaded a cart with spices and pushed it up and down the street outside the prison, shouting the names of his wares in the sing-song of the market. Between the cries of "saffron" and "cumin" he called out his legal question in the same rhythm. To anyone listening it sounded like the name of one more exotic spice nobody had heard of.
Inside the cell, Akiva was listening carefully. He understood what was being asked. Then, when his own voice rose — perhaps groaning, perhaps praying, perhaps calling out for water — he wove the answer into the sound of a prisoner's complaint. The peddler in the street heard his teacher. The guards heard nothing.
The Romans could jail a rabbi's body. They could not jail the Oral Torah moving between two men who loved it enough to smuggle a ruling past a prison wall in a spice seller's voice.
Torah, when it has to, learns to whisper.