The benefit of this approach is simple: The original passphrase can't be brute-forced from only the encrypted result without trying all the recusrive encryptions and knowing how many recusion levels were used during encryption.
echo hello | red e world | tee hello-world.enc.txt | red d world
Now the hello-world.enc.txt file is "hello" encrypted recursively using sha512-recursive digests of the "world" passphrase.