Avot204

1:
Our mishnah is a logical continuation of the preceding mishnah. Having established that man has free will even though God is both omnipotent and omniscient; and having stated that despite the fact that man has free will his actions are nevertheless judged – however benignly – Rabbi Akiva now addresses these seeming contradictions.

2:
Our mishnah is, in fact, an extended metaphor, and this certainly makes the argument more simple to appreciate. Our life is likened to a customer coming to buy merchandise in a shop. We 'buy' from the Storekeeper on credit, but He has his debt-collectors constantly active to ensure that all accounts are duly paid.

3:
Everything is given under surety: human beings are granted their lives as a loan from Heaven. In that sense our lives are not ours and we should constantly be aware that at some time in the future the loan will be recalled.

A net is spread for every living thing: Like all the Talmudic sages, Rabbi Akiva assumes we know our bible thoroughly; that is why, I think, he permits himself merely to hint at a biblical verse [Ecclesiastes 9:12]; most of us need to read the verse itself in order to appreciate the hint:

4:
The ledger is open: this is similar to the teaching that we encountered in Avot 2:1 –

5:
But the debt-collectors daily call in the debts: within the purport of the metaphor the Storekeeper's debt-collectors are what William Shakespeare so aptly termed "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune". We are visited by misfortune in one form or another, and Rabbi Akiva sees human susceptibility to disease and ultimately death as being part of the mechanism whereby the debts incurred by life are collected.

6:
And all is prepared for the banquet: here Rabbi Akiva reverts to the teaching of the sages which we have discussed many times in this tractate. The banquet in this extended metaphor is what the sages called Teĥiyyat ha-Metim – the resurrection of the dead at the end of time as a prelude to the great judgement. We discussed this concept at great length in Avot 020 and the following shiurim.

In Avot 203 we were still discussing the implications of man's free will. Jacob Chinitz writes:

This is the problem which worries me in the sphere of free will: if we accept this seriously – if the Creator is serious about this – then logically we should have to believe that the fate of the individual and the general, the story of our lives and national and world history, are dependent on us and not upon divine providence. If everything truly is in the hands of heaven with the exception of the fear of heaven we must examine what 'fear of heaven' entails. Is it going too far to say that everything that God commands is part of 'fear of heaven'? Does He not command us concerning the preservation of our health, war and peace, settlement of Eretz-Israel, supporting the poor and all kinds of acts of kindness? It follows that the result of our observance or non-observance of these commandments is dependent on us and not on divine providence. For me it is an old conundrum that all the prayers in the Amidah – from knowledge to the building of Jerusalem – deal with matters that we have to do. We are required to study Torah, to repent, to return to our land, to our city and rebuild it. Is it permissible to ask God to do all these things for us?

I respond:

I agree with Jacob that modern man requires a more sophisticated understanding of divine providence. In his "Guide for the Perplexed" Rambam presents several ways to understand this doctrine, but this only serves to obfuscate what his own teaching would be.

When we pray for repentance we know that it is dependent on us: we are telling God what we feel we need, and that prayer is designed to help us towards true repentance. We know that God cannot make us repent, for repentance is dependent on our exercising an act of free will. (If God waves a magic wand and hey presto! we repent that is a travesty of the meaning of repentance.) But we do ask for help and encouragement to do what we have to do. The same applies to all the other prayers: we are asking God to help us achieve all these goals, even though we know that their actual achievement is dependent on us.

In an earlier stage of our spiritual development our people prayed for a miraculous deliverance from the horrors of exile and from complete lack of independence. They imagined a sudden act of divine deliverance. But that miraculous act never materialized. Theodor Herzl and the Zionist movement achieved that deliverance. The modern sophisticated Jew should have no problem is perceiving in the achievements of the Zionist enterprise the hand of divine providence at work. God works daily miracles of healing through the wondrous expertise of doctors and nurses and researchers. God gives us the means to bring a modicum of prosperity to all, but we must husband and administer those means wisely.

I could give many more examples of what prayer could and should mean to the modern Jew. I hope that the hints that I have given in this already over-long response are sufficient for others to extrapolate further consideration for themselves.