The Uniform

"The most sacred part of sports is the uniform." 

Sports analyst Colin Cowherd 

Clothing is big part of identity. There are people who paint their rooms in the colors of the uniforms of their sports teams. There are former players who develop a life long dislike of the colors of the uniforms of opposing teams. In baseball, they make a big ceremony out of a new player trying on the team's jersey in front of the press.

When the Israeli army makes Haredim change out of their white shirts and black pants and put on green, goyish army shirts and pants, out of their bekeshers and put on an army jacket, when they make them take off their hats and streimels and put on army berets or helmets, when black dress shoes are replaced with heavy army boots, it's an identity changer. It pulls them from their Haredi identity, from their Jewish identity, and gives them a military identity and that of the secular anti-religious country that tells you regularly that it's the army that protects its citizens and sin does not endanger them. And that's dangerous. And it's intentional.

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Rabbi Avigdor Miller speaks about this topic. See Toras Avigdor parshas Pikudei, 5785. 

Human beings are what their garments are. If you take a pair of ragged jeans and put it on a human being, he becomes a bum. And even though it’s only external clothing – “it’s just clothes,” he says – but the truth is that inwardly he becomes a bum too! The garment evokes a certain way of thinking, of behavior.

And if you’ll take that ragged bum off the street and put a uniform on him, he’ll be a changed man. That’s why when you’re walking on the street and you see a policeman in a blue uniform so to some extent you feel that this man is on the side of the law. It doesn’t mean that he’s going to withstand big temptation if somebody offers him big money but ordinarily we feel confident that he is now on the side of law and order.

But the question is why should that be? We know that policemen are recruited from Bensonhurst and you can be quite certain that before they had a uniform they were on the other side. So what is that now all of a sudden he became an upholder of law and order?

The answer is the great principle that we spoke about many times which the Mesillas Yesharim taught us: הַחִיצוֹנִיּוֹת מְעוֹרֶרֶת אֶת הַפְּנִימִיּוֹת – A man’s outwardliness affects his inwardliness. And merely by putting on a certain outfit, a uniform, he assumes a certain responsibility. The clothes make him a different person.

That’s the greatness of mankind, by the way. It doesn’t matter who – brown, white, black, yellow, any color; mankind alone is innately endowed with noble emotions, with greatness of character. And a uniform is one of the ways of bringing man’s greatness to the surface. Because if you put a blue uniform on a baboon it wouldn’t accomplish much. But you see here a bum wearing a blue uniform on the street corner twirling his baton and now he’s on the side of law and order. Yesterday he was on the same street corner breaking windows! Yesterday he used to walk out of the corner store with his pockets bulging! And now he put on a blue uniform and you trust him. 

And on a related subject, a group of Lubavitchers who were promised to be allowed to wear their white shirts and black pants if they joined the army have been forced to wear army green all day long. I know personally the family of the bochur that was so tricked.