In Java you would create a thread pool and configure it to restart the threads if they die. Each thread would wake up every so often to query SSH and dump their results into a queue. If the query threads die, the processes reading the queue at the other end have nothing to do so they won't execute. Its easy to make a consumer queue that executes some code on another thread whenever data arrives.

Java's exposure of the underlying OS threads and cheap transfer of data between threads lets people build libraries on top that offer memory models used by Erlang and others. Its not built in or quite as convenient, but you can use actors and fibers in Java if you want to.