It was mid-day in mid-July in lower Manhattan. I am not the first to observe it felt like the inside of a dog’s mouth. I was in town to hear a case. We were taking a lunch break, and I was eating a sandwich on a park bench when a Haredi man walk by. Haredi are the ultra-Orthodox Jewish men you often see in New York City. He was wearing the clothing that marks a member of his tribe: black suit, white shirt, black shoes, long black coat, and a high-crowned black hat. The hat is so closely linked to the Haredi that they are sometimes known as black hats.

I allowed myself to indulge in the pleasure of mental ridicule. How absurd he looks, I thought to myself. Imagine wearing an overcoat on a day like this!

Usually when you see someone dressed that radically out of sync with the weather he is pushing a grocery cart full of plastic bags. Either because mental illness is accompanied by damage to the internal thermostat or because homelessness compels people to use their body as their closet, we tend to think that people who wear long black coats in the summer are homeless or crazy or both. But this guy was neither. He was merely wearing his tribal uniform. What an absurd tribe it must be that requires its members to make themselves so uncomfortable, I thought.

But then I had an epiphany. I noticed that I was also very uncomfortable, and I realized it was because I was also dressed in my tribal uniform.

I am a lawyer. When I am at work I wear dark wool suits, black shoes and long-sleeved, starched white shirts. I wear high black socks. I wear a neck tie – a special silk ribbon carefully knotted in a specific way so it hangs to a point just below the waistband of my dark wool pants. I would no more wear a short sleeved shirt or short socks than I would wear a nose ring.

It is not a matter of fashion. No one would describe me as well dressed. My suits are boxy and shapeless. There is nothing about them that makes me look attractive or fashionable. I wear them for no better reason than because this is what members of my tribe wear.

Yes, it’s 93° and I’m wearing a wool coat. Yes, it’s as humid as a rice cooker and I have my collar buttoned up and a slip knot pulled tight around my neck. To any sane person, I look like an idiot. But I do it because this is what people like me do. I am not likely to change. I’m too old and too set in my ways. And I too closely identify with my tribe to violate any of its norms. It’s a matter of identity.

For a moment I realized that my tribe is no less absurd than the one that compels its members to wear black hats or the one that compels its members to wear ear gauges, tattoos and nose rings.

It is possible that my epiphany may make me pause before I ridicule the members of other tribes. Perhaps at last I have taken a small step toward empathy toward others whose tribal identities make uncomfortable demands.