Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom for a Complicated World (Jacob the Baker Series)

It was cold in his room, and the cold interfered with his ability to focus on his prayers. He knew he was saying them quickly. He prayed for understanding.

He turned on the small heater in his bathroom and dressed in front of it. The warmth soothed the back of his legs.

In the kitchen, he sliced a piece of hard cheese and dark bread. He ate slowly while the tea water boiled. When the tea was ready, Jacob clenched a cube of sugar between his teeth and
relished in the hot tea, sliding slowly past the sweetness.

“Surely,” he thought to himself, “this is a taste of life in the world to come.”

The moon was still high as he walked to the bakery. His boots crunched the snow, and the sound traveled back to his youth. He felt a great truth between the silver moon, the white snow, and the black night.

The shutters on most of the homes remained closed, their worlds asleep. He remembered a time when an old man would rap on the shutters and call people to morning prayers.

The old man was gone. He wondered what people would do if he started banging on their shutters.

He hurried on.

Behind the bakery, pigeons pecked circles in the hard ground, finishing the crumbs from yesterday’s bread.

Jacob stared at the tracks the birds left in the shallow pockets of snow. The three-fingered pattern radiating out of a single source … the patriarchs: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob … the past, the present, and the future … “Yes,” thought Jacob, “it fits. It all fits.”

The pigeons rose and settled on the rain gutters.

Jacob stood by himself, staring up at the stars between the buildings that pressed in on him.

He looked at his hands as he unlocked the rear door of the factory. Then he stepped from the night into the reassuring blackness of the bakery. “It is like pulling a prayer shawl over my head,” he thought. “This darkness is my own.”

He was stiff. Bending to fire the oven was an effort. From his knees, he hypnotically watched the pilot light and sensed its affirmation. He thought of the “eternal light” and patience. He prayed for such patience.

This was the oldest bakery in his community, and, though much had changed, the original oven remained. The bread it baked rode ’round and ’round on a ferris wheel of shelves. Jacob paused and laid his cheek on the warming bricks outside the old oven.

Soon the oven would reach temperature. Soon the other bakers would arrive. They could sleep later in the morning, see their children before they left for school. Jacob lived alone.

He was not lonely. He was cut from life but not removed.

He turned on the mixer and began to work the first dough. His eyes followed the spiral metal
arm on its endless roll. Its pattern confirmed a truth he saw everywhere.

Gradually, he added the warm water, careful not to make the dough too stiff or too wet. Moderation. Balance. Taking measure of what he was doing.

Jacob the baker understood this.

Now there was time. His time. A little time. The dough needed to rise. The oven’s heat curled through the bakery.

Jacob took a thick flat pencil from his back pocket and began to write. But, it really wasn’t Jacob writing.

Jacob was a reed, and the breath of God blew through Jacob, made music of him.

In this way, was Jacob’s voice.

Jacob finished just as the other bakers arrived. He folded the little pieces of paper with his scratchings and shoved them under the scale on the dough bench. At the end of the day, he would collect his thoughts and add them to the stacks at home. Now, he would make bread.

Cold air and light broke in through the back door. The bakery filled with activity. Men were coming and going with large silver pans of braided egg loaves, frosting white cakes with castles and pride, building biscuits, rolls, and bagels into tottering towers which collapsed into baskets where customers could, with delicious anticipation, pick their favorites.

Clearly, Jacob was a man on his path in the process of this work. He did not appear to be laboring. He was at one with his efforts. He knew what another baker needed without being asked. When Jacob worked with others, doors sprung open just when a load became unbearable
and closed behind men who often forgot to do so. In this way, Jacob’s contribution wasn’t simply the addition of another person’s efforts. It was, rather, that with Jacob one and one made three. He made the others more than they might have been. He didn’t think it made him more. He didn’t think about this at all.

Work for Jacob was, in many ways, like a prayer. It was a repetition, leading him out of himself and up Mt. Sinai with the grace of a soul not restrained by the weight of its own importance.

“Jacob!” a voice shouted, cutting through the bakery.

It was Samuel, the owner. He called for Jacob from the half-open swinging door that divided the bakery from the store.

Samuel was approximately the same age as Jacob but round and almost bald. And, like the
few people who actually knew Jacob, Samuel treated Jacob in a special way.

Jacob didn’t demand such consideration. It was just that Jacob couldn’t be treated like the others. Having Jacob work for him, somehow, made Samuel feel like a more religious man.

“Jacob,” asked Samuel, “how are you?”

Jacob didn’t say anything but simply angled his head to one side, knowing the question had nothing to do with why he had been called.

And Samuel knew that Jacob knew. And, in that moment, such was the wonderful silence both men shared.

“Jacob, I have a customer with a special request, but I need your help.”

Jacob smiled.

Samuel raised his eyebrows, offered a helpless grin, and continued. “Jacob, you know all those little pieces of paper you’ve been writing on for years with your ideas, or thoughts, or whatever you call them?”

“I don’t call them anything,” said Jacob.

“It’s not what you call them that’s important,” said Samuel, now holding his palms upward like a man frustrated trying to catch rain.

“Somehow, one of your ‘ideas’ found its way into a customer’s loaf of bread, and this lady thinks I put it there on purpose. Now she wants me to sell her bread for a community dinner, but each of the loaves must have one of your thoughts in it.”

Samuel’s face began to plead. “So? What do you say? Will you do it?”

Jacob pulled on his lower lip with his thumb and forefinger. “What was written on the piece of paper in her bread?”

“I don’t know,” said Samuel. “Why don’t you ask the lady? She wants to meet you. Come up front!”

Like a reluctant character dragged before the footlights on a giant stage, Jacob grew shy when he came into the retail section of the bakery.

Waiting there was a dark-haired lady, holding gloves in one hand and a purse in the other. She shifted her purse to the same hand that held her gloves so she could reach out and greet Jacob.

When she released his hand, she continued to stare down at the flour dust settling on the floor where Jacob stood. She swallowed in an attempt to gather herself.

“Did you write this?” she asked, thrusting one of Jacob’s notes forward.

The note read:
“Wisdom does not make me full. It fills me with hunger.”

Jacob looked at the paper and nodded his head.

“How wise you must be,” said the lady, with great flattery. “All my life I’ve been pursuing wisdom, and you’ve captured my frustration. I feel like a fool.”

“Anyone who has struggled with wisdom has felt like a fool,” said Jacob.

The lady and Samuel stood there in silence, looking at Jacob and weighing his remark.

Then, they looked back and forth at each other, then back at Jacob, then back at each other.

“Well, will he do it?” she asked Samuel, as if Jacob weren’t there.

Samuel turned to Jacob. “Well, will you do it? Will you let us have some of your ideas for the bread?”

Jacob grinned. “Only arrogance guards what it doesn’t own!”

Samuel nodded to the lady. “He’ll do it.”

The lady returned her focus to Jacob. “Thank you,” she said.

But Jacob had already retreated to the bakery, leaving her appreciation to find peace on the ground where Jacob left his footprints, in the flour dust.

Jacob traced his path to work on the way home. He traveled within. A small, frozen puddle
of water, caught by a rock, huddled next to a curb and drew his attention.

“An eternity is any moment opened with patience,” he reminded himself.

Then he raised the tip of his boot and pushed down on the layers of ice. He could feel the pressure of the lady’s request that morning in the bakery.

The ice cracked under the insistence of his boot, sending a map of new patterns across the surface.

He continued home and noted spring was in the air.

Jacob warmed a cup of soup for dinner and finished the heel of his morning bread.

His books of learning surrounded him, their blue binding appearing black in the light.

Small pads of yellow paper, a stack of blank white paper, pencils, and pens crowded a worn wooden desk.

Jacob sat to write but did not. The clean innocence of the empty pages instead invited his imagination on an ancient route, and, on that journey, absent of eternal arguments of logic and reason and individual perspective, Jacob climbed his ladder.

During the night, angels stared down through the stars into Jacob’s world. They watched him sleep. They commented on the way his body folded on the bed. They liked this man. They drew their wings over him and stood guard by his soul.

The next morning, Samuel’s voice flexed with excitement as it again reached into the bakery and begged for Jacob’s attention.

“That lady is back,” shouted Samuel. “Everyone loved your ‘thoughts’ in their bread. But, they want more. They all want more. Will you do it for me?”

Max, the young man with thick muscles, who carried the flour sacks, gave Jacob a gentle elbow in the ribs and winked at him.

“How much will they pay you? Maybe you can make some extra money, eh?” Max raised his voice at the end of his sentence.

“You know, he may be right,” said Samuel. “Are you interested, Jacob?”

“No!” said Jacob with amusement. “Greed only uses expectation to arrive at despair.”

Max was intrigued. “Does that mean you’re going to give them your thoughts for nothing?”

“I will,” said Jacob, touched by Max’s form of caring.

Jacob nodded his consent to Samuel.

“Thank you,” said Samuel, and he meant it. But, from somewhere, in an unarticulated voice, he knew his friend’s life was changing. Forever.

And Samuel was right. Because now, people hurried to the bakery, anxious to ask Jacob how they should live, and what should be said to this child, and how do I struggle with this sadness?

They came in haste and noise and deep concern. They reached out to touch him as he walked down the street.

The secret of Jacob became a whisper, which rode the wind into every ear, and the community embraced Jacob as if he were a long-ignored human treasure suddenly unearthed.

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