Rabbi Meir was one of the great teachers of the generation after the destruction of the Temple, and he had a problem. Wicked men in the neighborhood were harassing him. He prayed for their deaths.
His wife Beruria — one of the few women whose learning is cited as authoritative in the Talmud — overheard his prayer and corrected him. "Look again at the verse," she said. "It does not say let sinners cease from the earth. It says let sins cease from the earth. Do not pray for their deaths. Pray that they repent."
Meir heard her. He prayed for their change of heart instead — and the men changed.
Gaster's Exempla (1924), No. 46, records the exchange in a single sentence: "Beruria taught her husband Rabbi Meir, who was troubled by wicked people, to pray against sin and not against sinners." The tiny adjustment — pray for the disappearance of what they do, not of what they are — is the difference between a Jewish prayer and a curse.
Heaven hears the difference. And a wife who reads more carefully than her husband is a teacher too.