In a scene in the first Harry Potter book, young Harry is about to buy his first wand. He enters Olivander’s and tries a few out. The first is too weak. The second is too strong. Then Olivander spies a wand on the top shelf, gives it to Harry, and suddenly there is a warmth, and a glow, and Harry’s true magical prowess is manifest. Olivander peers over his glasses and says, “The wand chooses the wizard, Mr. Potter. It is not always clear why.”

The books’ author, J.K. Rowling, explains, “This is due to the unique character of each wand, which must match that of the wizard, as the wizard may not be able to perform magic if his and his wand’s characters conflict, or the magic may be sub-par to magic performed with the wizard’s own wand… a wand, in my world, is merely a vehicle – a vessel for what lies inside the person.”

I think about this as we celebrate Shavuot, the holiday of teaching and learning – sometimes called “the scholar’s festival.” I celebrate it each year by staying up all night teaching and studying at the downtown Toronto tikkun, where hundreds of people across the religious spectrum just want to study Torah.

The text is a Torah teacher’s wand, and with it, we can do magic. When it’s the wrong text, no amount of fancy footwork, and no clever anecdotes, can make it right. When it’s the wrong text, no sparks fly.

Try as we may, bend it and twist it, it’s as if we and our wand are in conflict, and the magic always feels sub-par. The text chooses the teacher. It is not always clear why.

Teachers must have their wands at the ready. We teach our best when we know that the text is merely a vehicle – a vessel for what lies inside us. But just as a text chooses its teacher, a text will find its way into the heart of a student, I believe, with or without a teacher’s guide. When the student is ready, the text appears. The trigger event that brings an adult into the classroom, or to a Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the moment of recognition of an inability to master a Jewish subject and the need to remedy the situation, that’s enough to open the door and for a text to come flying in. But a Dumbledore is needed to contain the flying text and help students see themselves in it.

I think rabbis put too much stock in the fortuitous melding of North American culture and the Torah portion, and in finding the intriguing and “fun” ways that we can share the text with our congregants or students. It creates tremendous stress from July until after Simchat Torah. It makes us compete with one another across synagogue bulletins, websites and sermonic sharing engines. It makes us strive to “one up” ourselves on the last great sermon we gave. It makes us sometimes, sadly, forget the text itself, or bend it into an unrecognizable shape, or lose our hold on the text altogether. It makes us wave our wands furiously, trying to ignite a magic that’s already there.

The text chooses the teacher, but that leaves us with profound insecurity and difficult questions. What do I do if I’m drawn to teach a text that is so problematic, so ethically challenging, so disturbing that the magic it produces is dark and dangerous? What do I do if I’ve been teaching for so long, giving the same sermon for so long, that I feel as if my wand is wearing thin from overuse? And what do I do with my magic if everyone else in the room full of students is a muggle, a person wholly unfamiliar, uninterested and unmoved by the magic of Torah? Or even frightened by it?

There’s something magical about several hundred people packed into rooms studying Torah all night, no matter what they study. There’s something even more magical as the sun comes up and the last sturdy few reflect on how much they’ve learned. It’s the teachers who do magic, but the students who take that magic and change the world. The text chooses the teacher, but without students, Hogwarts is an empty castle.