Please bear with us as we sort this all out, but in the meantime here are Passover messages we can learn from it!
It so happens that our website had an upgrade just before Passover that set us back a bit. Due to a URL listing switch, external searches for certain webpages on our site would turn up as an error. The only way to find those pages is to search internally, on our site itself, using the original URL links, not the shortcuts that we had before and Google became familiar with. The pages are there, only that google and all those searches are looking for them using URL address shortcuts that no longer exist after our upgrade.
This whole matter should resolve itself soon (hopefully!), as the search engines crawl through our pages once again, indexing them properly with their new URLs. But it can be a Passover lesson for us as well! Too much of the time we are busy viewing things using an external search. This web challenge of ours can be a reminder to refocus, to seek the same page of our lives internally, from the inside. Whether that inside focus be family, or within our Jewish people, or spiritual growth—all focusing inward, internal. Yes, Judaism also has an outward focus, the Rebbe had a broader vision, but sometimes we need to turn inward to connect.
It’s also a message about the problem with shortcuts. And this affects even internal links that we wrote as shortcuts without the full length URL address. Yes, we may have shortened the links for easier accessibility but in the long run they simply don’t work. Based on the Talmud, Tanya has a message about the short way that tuned long and the longer route that ended up being shorter.
One more lesson from this experience: We had advertised the Passover 2018 link on social-media, on campus flyers, in emails etc. But due to this glitch that shortened link no longer worked. Then we realized the link would work if we capitalized the “P” of Passover. Ah, indeed, that’s so important… we must capitalize on Passover!