Harry Potter and the Ever Spinning Sword

That Ba’al Shem Tov asks a great question on this week’s Parsha. When Adam and Chava are kicked out of Gan Eden, Hashem guards the entrance with a spinning sword. While that’s a very difficult guard to get around, there are periodical gaps in the protection, and it is possible to get through. When looking for a good way to protect the entrance, would not an unbreakable wall be significantly better?

I think a similar question can be asked on the first Harry Potter book, The Philosopher’s Stone. It comes up multiple times that Hogwarts is the safest place for the stone to be kept, but when it comes down to it, all the finest protections were defeated by three first-year Wizards. As gifted as they were, this needs to raise questions about the quality of the stone’s protection. It’s not that the teachers couldn’t have come up with better protections, it’s that their protections were clearly flawed. There was a way to beat every obstacle. If you couldn’t get passed Snape’s protection without the right potion then DON’T PUT THE RIGHT POTION IN THE ROOM! The same idea can be applied to almost all obstacles. Don’t make the chess pieces playable, don’t put the right key in the room with all the keys. And if Dumbledore needed to get the Stone, firstly he can lift the apparition ban (seen in the sixth when they practice Apparition in school), secondly he could then take the key or the potion with him when he goes. The tasks are difficult, but clearly beatable when they don’t need to be. The only thing protecting the Stone is the mirror, and it doesn’t get there until January. It was virtually protection-less for six months.

It’s no coincidence that the mirror didn’t start off protecting the stone, and only when Harry discovers it, and Dumbledore can make sure he knows how to work it, that it’s then moved. It wasn’t moved in January because that was it’s time to be moved, it was moved in January because now Harry knew how to beat it. The protections around the stone were beatable because protecting the stone was not Dumbledore’s main goal. His goal was to train Harry to be able to beat them, and once he figured out how, he’d be ready to face what was waiting for him. This was necessary practice because Dumbledore knew that Harry would need to learn how to defeat Voldemort for the future. Harry explains in the last chapter that Dumbledore knew that he was going to go after Voldemort, and he wanted to prepare him.      “So what happened to you two?” said Harry.

 “Well, I got back all right,” said Hermione. “I brought Ron round — that took a while — and we were dashing up to the owlery to contact Dumbledore when we met him in the entrance hall — he already knew — he just said, ‘Harry’s gone after him, hasn’t he?’ and hurtled off to the third floor.”
 “D’you think he meant you to do it?” said Ron. “Sending you your father’s cloak and everything?”
 “Well, ” Hermione exploded, “if he did — I mean to say that’s terrible — you could have been killed.”
 “No, it isn’t,” said Harry thoughtfully. “He’s a funny man, Dumbledore. I think he sort of wanted to give me a chance. I think he knows more or less everything that goes on here, you know. I reckon he had a pretty good idea we were going to try, and instead of stopping us, he just taught us enough to help. I don’t think it was an accident he let me find out how the mirror worked. It’s almost like he thought I had the right to face Voldemort if I could…” Harry wouldn’t have gotten much practice in if no one could get past any of the obstacles. It seems pretty clear that protection was not Dumbledore’s aim.

This is essentially the Ba’al Shem Tov’s answer. Hashem could make it impossible for us to enter Gan Eden pretty easily, but that’s not his goal. He wants it to be possible. He wants to make it difficult enough that we need to work on ourselves significantly before we can get in, and that’s his goal. He hopes, not to guard Gan Eden, rather motivate us to use our lives for training. If we work on ourselves, work on our service of god, work on our fulfillment of his mitzvoth, then we, like Harry, will find ourselves with the abilities to easily defeat the obstacles in our way.