Dov Lando is 96 years old, heads the Slabodka Yeshiva, and is the spiritual leader of Degel HaTorah, one of the parties that make up Israel’s ultra-Orthodox political establishment. He appears to think the establishment part was, on balance, a mistake. In footage broadcast by Channel 12 on Monday, as Al Jazeera reported, Lando mused at a closed meeting at his home in Bnei Brak that Jews may have been better off without a state of their own. He also said that soldiers adhering to Religious Zionism who are killed in Israel’s wars are dying because of what their rabbis taught them — that is, because they were taught the state has religious meaning and that fighting for it is a sacred duty, rather than a political arrangement with an army attached.

The timing is awkward in a very specific way. Israel holds a parliamentary election on October 27, three weeks from now, and the remarks have detonated mid-campaign. They are also not exactly fresh: the footage was recorded around a year and a half ago, according to The New Arab, and some of Lando’s views had circulated in Israeli media before. Last month he launched what Middle East Eye described as an unusually scathing attack on the Religious Zionist movement, saying of its followers: “They wage wars not for the sake of rescue, only for the sake of the state’s honour,” and calling them “evil.” What Channel 12 added was the footage itself, on television, during an election, which is a different thing.

To understand why this matters politically, you need the deal at the center of Israeli coalition politics. Ultra-Orthodox parties — Degel HaTorah sits in the Knesset as part of United Torah Judaism — have been reliable partners for Benjamin Netanyahu. In exchange they have historically sought two things: state funding for their yeshivas and schools, and exemptions from mandatory military service for their young men, so they can study instead of serve. The conscription arrangement has become one of the most bitter questions in Israeli public life, especially with the country at war and reserve call-ups lengthening for everyone else. Into this walks the theological head of one of those parties, on tape, suggesting the state might not have been a good idea in the first place.

The political problem writes itself, and the opposition picked it up immediately: Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox partners want out of the state’s central obligation while drawing on its budget, and now their own spiritual authority is on record doubting the enterprise their voters’ neighbors are dying for. The coalition is being asked to defend men who would rather not serve, on behalf of a rabbi who is not sure the country should exist.

There is a fine coda here. This month Lando also went after ultra-Orthodox voices urging a boycott of the Knesset election, saying, per Israel National News, that those promoting the idea act out of “wickedness or stupidity.” So: the state may have been an error, voting in its parliament is essential, and the budgets it passes are, one assumes, worth collecting. The theology can be ambivalent. The election math is not.