Connection Doctor

Video-conferencing used to be high tech, expensive, big business only.
The rest of us had to rely on telephones. The Internet revolutionized personal communications in many ways. It started with usergroups and bulletin boards, precursors to chat rooms, then discussion groups and blogs. But these weren't real time. They were electronic letters.

What really made texting take off, though, was Instant Messenger™ (IM) and its variants. But most of us talk faster than we type. So the computer wizards found a way of incorporating first audio, then video into the IM™ system. Video-conferencing for the rest of us.

Of course, you have to buy a camera and hook it up - unless you have a Mac, which has the camera built-in. What a great way to see the children or spouse when traveling, or the grandkids that live in another city.

A virtual vidphone!

Still, it all depends on the routers, ISPs and the whole world-wide web, ethernet/wifi thing. If the electron packets get blocked, there's no picture, and you can't see the wife or kids.

If that happens, you have to diagnose the problem, find out if it's hardware - processing speed, software (outdated program), internet service provider, or who knows what else.

For that, there's a diagnostic tool, at least on the Mac, called a Connection Doctor. This program tells you what's going on inside so you can identify the problem.

There's an obvious parallel to our spiritual communications.

At first, we are "texting" messages to the Divine. There's a lapse between transmission, reception and response. And the communication itself lacks the immediacy of the visual; we have room for doubt, because we don't see it, we don't experience G-dliness directly

As we become more spiritually mature, we might hear "G-dliness" - 'hear'in the sense of understanding, of intellectual comprehension.

Still, we do not yet "see" G-dliness. It takes time - deep study of Torah, Talmud, Jewish thought, Chasidut; Jewish meditation; concentration in prayer - before we can see - directly experience G-dliness. And even so, our vision is screened, so to speak; we see not G-dliness Itself, but a transmitted replication of it.

Yet it is precisely at this level, when we have refined ourselves, when we have the delicate awareness of the G-dliness that exists within and energizes the world, that we may not get a "connection," so to speak.
That is, when Judaism is most active in our lives, when we feel most Jewish, at that point, we may not perceive G-d's Presence. We may feel, in fact, disconnected, as if talking to a spiritual void.

Here, then, we need a spiritual "Connection Doctor," a way of determining what's clogging the spiritual byways, the channels through which our soul's "packets" travel. Only then, we can get our "signals"
to the "router."

That "Connection Doctor" can be found readily in the teachings of the Rebbe, his talks, discourses and letters. The Rebbe, as the spiritual leader, the Moses, of our generation, has already provided us with the diagnostics, the tools to repair our connections, to perceive G-dliness.

How so? Moshiach will come, as the Baal Shem Tov related, when the teachings of Chasidut have spread forth. And the essence of Chasidut can be found nowadays in the teachings of the Rebbe. Thus, through studying the Rebbe's teachings, when the final Redemption occurs, we will fulfill the prophet's assurance that "all flesh will see G-dliness."