Beruriah, the scholar and teacher married to Rabbi Meir in second-century Tiberias, was famous for being able to hold her own against any opponent in Scripture. A woman belonging to a heretical sect, a Min, once confronted her over a verse from Isaiah: "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear" (Isaiah 54:1). The opponent pressed a simple objection: "Why should a childless woman be told to sing? You are telling her to celebrate the very thing she weeps over."
Beruriah did not dodge the question. She gave an answer that is harder than it sounds.
"Let her rejoice," Beruriah said, "that she did not bear a child, because the child she would have borne was destined for Gehinnom."
In Beruriah's reading, Isaiah was not addressing every childless woman. He was speaking to a specific kind of sorrow. Sometimes a child who would have been born would have lived a wicked life, and a mother who never held that child was spared a much deeper grief. The verse is a consolation, not a prescription. It is meant for the woman who, for reasons she cannot see, was kept from a motherhood that would have ended in mourning.
The Exempla preserves this exchange as one of the sharp little moments of Beruriah's theological swordsmanship. The heretic expected the Jewish scholar to wilt under an apparently cruel verse. Instead, Beruriah turned the verse into an argument for the unseen kindness of a God who sometimes answers our most urgent prayers by refusing them.