reconnect ssh connection?

[David Garamond]

has someone come up with a trick to let disconnected ssh connections be
recovered without terminating and having to restart rsync (perhaps by
wrapping ssh or something)?

i have a very large (but pretty stable/unchanging) tree of files that i
need to sync daily, at night, between two geographically different
servers. i'm using rsync -avz --force -e ssh SOURCE DEST. the connection
is pretty slow and quite unreliable and many times the rsync process is
terminated in the middle because of disconnected tcp connection.
restarting rsync would begin the process of building the filelist which
is pretty slow.

-- 
dave