Free Jacob the Baker: Gentle Wisdom for a Complicated World (Jacob the Baker Series) by Noah benShea Page A

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 unbearableand 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 thefew 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