Rabbi Meir had a problem. Hooligans in his neighborhood were making his life miserable. His solution was direct—he prayed to God for them to die.
His wife, Beruria, one of the sharpest minds in all of Talmudic literature, stopped him cold. She pointed to (Psalms 104:35): "Let sins cease from the land." Not sinners—sins. The verse does not call for the destruction of wicked people. It calls for the destruction of wickedness itself.
"Moreover," she told him, "look at the end of the verse: 'And the wicked will be no more.' If the sinners are dead, how can they be 'no more wicked'? They can only stop being wicked if they are alive to repent." Her logic was airtight.
Rabbi Meir accepted the correction. He changed his prayer. Instead of asking God to destroy his tormentors, he prayed for God to have mercy on them—that they should repent. And according to Berakhot 10a, they did. The hooligans turned their lives around.
Beruria appears elsewhere in this same passage dismantling a heretic who tried to mock (Isaiah 54:1)—the verse about a barren woman who sings. The heretic sneered: why should a barren woman rejoice? Beruria called him a fool and directed him to the end of the verse, reinterpreting it as a celebration of the community of Israel, which unlike the heretic's people, did not give birth to children destined for Gehinnom (גהנם), the realm of punishment.
In both stories, Beruria's method is the same. Read the whole verse. Look at the ending. The conclusion changes everything.