Rabbi Yaakov Medan, head of Har Etzion Yeshiva, responds to the comments by the dean of the Slabodka Yeshiva Rabbi Dov Lando, considered one of the leaders of the non-Hassidic (Litvish) haredi community, against Zionism and participation in the army.

"When a great Rabbi wants to acknowledge a miracle, why does he need to disparage the soldiers and say they only interposed between God and the world? Somewhere it has been established that there are two tracks that do not intersect. We must either thank God, as is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible or thank a man, if God is to be taken out of the picture."

"The ability to know how to be grateful to soldiers and at the same time to know how dependent we are on the deeds of the Almighty, and to live with this complexity, apparently is not a self-evident thing."

Rabbi Medan emphasized, "What they are doing by not going to the army is studying Torah and not observing it. It is like studying the laws of tzitzit and not wearing tzitzit, studying the laws of tefillin, and not putting on tefillin. This thing - helping Israel in the war - is the observance of Torah."