Most people wouldn’t give a second thought to the Torah pointer they use to read and follow along with the Hebrew text.
Known as a yad in Hebrew, the Torah pointer is commonly used in place of an index finger on the page, as it’s considered respectful to avoid direct contact with the scroll. It’s usually silver or another precious metal.
At the University of Virginia’s Fralin Museum of Art, each of the more than 80 yads on display is different from the last. “Between Hand and Scroll” displays Torah pointers made from a range of materials: gold, silver, pearls, jewels, badger hairs, a whale’s tooth, porcupine quills, whitefish vertebrae, recycled cans and a skateboard. They’re all somehow connected to the natural world.
“‘Normally, you take a yad for granted,’” Wendy Ligon Smith, an assistant professor at UVA who curated the exhibition, recalled viewers saying. “‘It’s just the thing that’s hanging on the Torah that you use.’ And they had never thought of them as artworks.”
These works of art are part of a recent gift to the museum of 150 Torah pointers by Virginia philanthropist Clay Barr, who has collected yads for nearly 30 years in honor of her late husband, Jay D. A. Barr.
“The collector started by collecting antique yads — Torah pointers — and they’re very decorative, beautiful,” Ligon Smith said. “Then she started commissioning contemporary artists to make yads out of all different kinds of things.
“There are a number of them that are made out of interesting materials,” she added, including porcelain, blown glass and forged steel.
Virginia sculptor Spencer Tinkham designed a wooden yad using Barr’s grandson’s broken skateboard. A yad by Colombian artist Federico Uribe is made entirely of pencils with an eraser for the pointer.
“When you look at the form of it, you can kind of tell, ‘I wouldn’t actually use this,’” Ligon Smith said. “Can you actually hold this to use it? Not really. A lot of the yads are only Torah pointers in the sense that that’s the form they’re recalling; they don’t actually have the practical purpose of being a yad.”
Ligon Smith, an art historian by training, arranged the exhibition by design or by the material used by the artist.
“Most visitors notice these came from all over,” Ligon Smith said of the yads on display. “They notice that there’s a Torah pointer from Poland in the 1900s; there’s one from Afghanistan from the 1800s; there’s one from England from the last 50 years. Seeing them all in proximity, a lot of people have walked away appreciating the global reach of Jewish religious practice.”
She also said the yads’ designs and materials vary by country of origin, from France and Finland to Morocco and Israel.
“There’s lots of variety, which I think surprises some people,” Ligon Smith said.
Ligon Smith worked with Lise Dobrin, a professor of anthropology at UVA, and the students of the fall 2024 Curating Culture course. Ligon Smith focused on the art history and design aspects, while Dobrin provided the cultural background as a member of Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville and regular Torah reader.
Knowing that the average visitor to the exhibit wouldn’t have background knowledge about a yad, Ligon Smith and Dobrin got to work defining, “What is a Torah pointer?” which first begs the question: “What is the Torah?”
Dobrin approached her senior rabbi, Rabbi Tom Gutherz, for his knowledge of Jewish tradition: “I felt like he was a safe backstop for a lot of the things we were doing.”
“We wanted there to be enough context about what the ritual reading of Torah is about,” Dobrin said. “We decided to include a video recording of a Torah service … and that is featured as part of the exhibition.”
Through this exhibit, non-Jewish viewers learn “very basic things about Judaism,” such as the importance of the Torah, the custom of reading from the text on Saturday mornings and what that service looks like.
Jewish viewers’ experiences might be completely different.
“For viewers who are familiar with Jewish ritual practice and Torah reading, it draws attention to the yad as a form,” Dobrin said. “All of our yads that we use are decorated in some way, but we just don’t think about that. So [this exhibit] expands out your thinking of what a yad can be and what a Jewish cultural object can be.”
Ligon Smith said the exhibit offers a lot for viewers to connect with regardless of their background. Children, for instance, appear to have fun with the search-and-find aspect of the exhibition.
“Because the objects are relatively small, it does feel like a treasure hunt,” Ligon Smith said.
“One of the things about this exhibition is that there are many little things and they’re all beautiful and interesting,” Dobrin said. “So it’s fun to look at. … It pulls you in. The lighting is very powerful, so it’s dark in the room and you look down and see this beautiful, little decorated thing and read about it.”
“Between Hand and Scroll: The Barr Collection” opened in February and will be on display through July 20.
