Moral Vision and Moral Confusion

One of the first prayers our siddur has us say in the morning is "Thank you God for giving us the ability to distinguish darkness from light". In the Comic Book Siddur, I illustrate this as a caped character running and pointing his way towards the sun, out from billowing dark clouds. With this imagery, it's clear that there is "Light" and "Dark", and that it's easy to tell the differene: Black billowing clouds with angry face = Dark; Bright shining smiling sun = Light. That's a simple graphic convention I used to provide a simple meaning to that blessing, to illustrate darkness and light, and how they are different. But if you examine the wording of that blessing, you'll see that the real meaning is much more profound.

It's not enough that God separated Darkness from Light in the early days of Creation. What we're thanking God for is our ability to tell the difference. But who can't tell the difference between darkness and light? Those who are blind. The prayer thanking God for opening the eyes of the blind immediatly follows the prayer thanking God for letting us distinguish darkness from light.

If were are take these prayers at face value, they are trivial, for it's obvious what the difference is between dark and light: one is defined by the other. Light = absence of Darkness, and vice versa. That same goes for the phrase "opening the eyes of the blind". If we were talking about those who are literally blind, then why would it even be in the siddur? Most of us can see; only a fraction of Humanity is without eyesight.

The only way to make sense of both of these prayers is on the metaphorical level. The concepts "dark", "light", and "blindness" have spiritual meaning only as it relates to our soul (that is, the seat of our emotions). I mean, the literal (or "simple") meaning of "light", "dark", and "sight" is nice enough; the world is filled with visual wonders, and our eyes allow us to appreciate them. But think about the moral meaning of these terms (light, dark, sight/vision): the siddur is advising us against moral confusion. We must pray to God that we maintain the ability to tell the difference between right and wrong, or else we're lost, blind, stumbling around in the dark with no direction home. Before you know it, you may be convincing yourself that Bad is Good, and vice versa. We should pray to God that we have a moral foundation, and that we don't forget who we are.

So how do you illustrate that in a comic book? By having a guy in a cape running out of an angry dark billowing cloud into a smiley happy bright sunshiney face.