If all fish with scales have fins, why doesn’t the Torah simply prohibit fish without scales?
Table for Five: Shemini
In partnership with the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
Edited by Nina Litvak & Salvador Litvak, the Accidental Talmudist
“Everything in water that has no fins and scales shall be an abomination for you.” – Leviticus 11:12
Liane Pritikin
Writer, Public Speaker
My first thoughts when I saw this pasuk were of a bathing suit store or a movie about a woman who falls in love with a fish. My next instinct was to look at the Hebrew and context of the line in the Torah. It’s part of a paragraph that talks about what you are allowed to eat from the water, as part of a larger section about the various rules of kashrut. We know that what we eat has a physical impact on our bodies. And as spiritual beings, we know what we eat impacts our souls. G-d mentions fins and scales three times in one paragraph. First as what we can eat, then twice as what we can’t eat. Not just genius marketing, but a way for us to understand it’s not just the message, but the way the message is communicated that matters. The Talmud says that any fish with scales has fins. Why mention the fins at all? Because G-d understands how we think. If you asked a little kid to draw a fish, it would almost always have fins—because that’s what we think of when we think of “fish.” G-d is telling us an important message in communication—it’s not just about what we want to say. It’s about how the other person will receive it. Would it be more efficient to just say scales? Perhaps. But definitely not as effective when you’re trying to get people to only eat certain types of fish.
Michael Milgraum
Psychologist and Author
According to Shimshon Raphael Hirsch, the creatures that we eat have an effect on our soul, and thus, we must be selective in what we literally let into ourselves. Hirsh notes that the scales of a fish provide it with protection, while fins give it the ability to navigate its environment and seek out what it needs. In contrast, sea creatures without scales and fins, which by and large are bottom dwellers, live a more passive life, particularly in the way that they generally consume sustenance that descends on its own to them.
Hirsch emphasizes throughout his writings that the charge given to a Jew is to live an active and engaged life. Just has a fish has tools to protect itself and act upon its environment, so we too must spiritually and physically protect ourselves from negative influences and very actively engage ourselves in the daily tasks of living and the greater goals that we live for and that give meaning to our lives.
This emphasis on being equipped, active and engaged in our world provides an important answer to those who claim that the religious person just spends all his time praying, rather than helping himself. Jewish tradition is rich with stories about pious people who did not only rely on Hashem to save them. As Jews, we must make our hishtadlus, our effort, to make the best life we can for ourselves, our family, and our community.
Abe Mezrich
Author, Words for a Dazzling Firmament
Until Aaron’s sons came, people only know God from a distance.
Yes, we could perceive Him in smoke and cloud and flames and thunder. In messages from angels. In visions and signs. Yes, even in prophecy. But it is Aaron’s sons who rush to meet God and encounter His flame on their skin.
Shortly after, God gives us rules of the animal kingdom. Not of animals in the abstract – who will swarm on the land; who will rule the skies and seas – but of the animals’ very physical selves. Their stomachs and legs. Their split hooves.
And for fish: their fins and scales.
It is Aaron’s sons who show the way. Of how to leave your post and find things face-to-face. To, for instance, go all the way from the desert to the sea. To drop your arms elbow-deep into the churning water. To find a fish and lay your hands on its sides. To feel its roughness. To know its ridges and grooves. To sense in your fingertips which one God wants for you, and which God does not.
To touch. And to find God there, touching back.
Rebbetzin Miriam Yerushalmi
CEO, SANE; Counselor, Author, Reaching New Heights Series
A suit of armor is constructed of small, overlapping pieces of metal, leather, or horn sewn onto a cloth garment. These pieces, called scales, may be flimsy individually, but together, they form an impenetrable shield. Tanya teaches that every mitzvah that one does, every coin of tzedakah that one gives, becomes a scale on the spiritual armor protecting our body, and a “helmet of salvation around one’s head”–protecting our minds from the foolish thoughts of the yetzer hara.
The element of water within us symbolizes vitality, love, kindness, and emotional connection. Almost everything on this planet needs water to survive and grow. Yet, water can also drown us, physically and spiritually, as it draws us after addictive passions.
“Everything in water” that has neither fins nor scales is completely off limits to klal Yisrael. Every fish that has scales, also has fins, but not every creature with fins has scales. Why do the two together make a fish kosher? The Lubavitcher Rebbe wrote, ”As the armor that protects the body of the fish, scales represent the quality of integrity, which protects us from the many pitfalls that life presents. … Fins, the organs that propel fish forward, represent ambition.”
Scales are a feature that enables a fish to swim more quickly and accurately. Without the scales of integrity, people will swim recklessly, ruthlessly, in pursuit of their desires. The mitzvos teach us how to meld our ambition to swim in the water of Torah, with the integrity to do so properly.
Rabbi Lori Shapiro
Open Temple
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 hyper-text 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.
With thanks to Liane Pritikin, Dr. Michael Milgraum, Abe Mezrich, Rebbetzin Miriam Yerushalmi and Rabbi Lori Shapiro.
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