Today’s daf highlights another way that the festival is different from Shabbat – that you can keep a fire going. This may seem obvious since we know that we can cook on the festival for the festival (which is also different from Shabbat) and how do you cook if you don’t have fire? But kindling a fire on Shabbat is such a BIG prohibition – a prohibition that we highlight by lighting candles both before Shabbat begins and after Shabbat ends just to highlight the difference between Shabbat and the end of the week. It’s a prohibition that is discussed in the Torah itself (not just a law by the rabbis) and a man is stoned to death for chopping wood on Shabbat! So, the fact that our daf discusses what wood you can use and how to chop it on the the festival is one way to show how very different the rules between Shabbat and the festivals are.
It also shows how much we value a hot cooked meal on chag.
Bon appetite.
2,711 pages of Talmud. A gem a day. 