what do i have to do to create a list to zap back and forth in that list

I assume you are referring to scrolling through the list.  It depends on how you want to do it.  If your list is small, you could load all elements into the context and use rich:datascroller.  If your list is large and pulling the data into memory is not an option, you should consider using paging (Hibernate makes this easy).  Check out the Query objects provided by Seam.