A repetition in the Torah is a blinking neon sign on a desert highway. For the rabbis, repetition is a hermeneutical hook – an opportunity to bait and repeat an explanation as if to say, “yes, that thing we just said in Leviticus 11:10, when we mentioned an abomination for eating anything in the sea without scales or fins we repeat in 11:12 to ensure that Torah is explicit in this prohibition – no shrimp!”
Both fins and scales only appear in all of Tanach twice – Deuteronomy and Ezekiel, 29:4 “Cling to your scales.”
These words are spoken against Pharaoh, in perhaps our most psychedelic and mysterious text, Ezekiel, the prophet of the outer reaches of time and space. Here, these words descend as a warning against Pharaoh of what God will do against the ultimate force of evil: PeyRah, the evil tongue, that which enslaves us. It is as if the power of these words appear as a declaration against all evil, one that is to be placed on our tongues, on our will, on our ever base suggestion.
Torah does not work in linear space – we cannot hypertext it, AI it or understand it in binaries. It is holographic, like an act of submersing ourselves deep into primordial waters of creation, and emerge with a body renewed. Perhaps “no shrimp” is to say “no body that is not capable of a spiritual journey.” This Pesach, may we all be kosher, and may we all be free.
Rabbi Lori Shapiro for Jewish Journal, April 2026