Community Service Day: A Success!

On November 25th, members of the NJIT Muslim Student Association headed out to Jersey City to help out a nonprofit organization named AngelaCARES in their 5th Annual Thanksgiving Feed The Seniors. In this event supplies of turkey, stuffing, vegetables, and other Thanksgiving rooted food were packaged into containers and then shipped out to local seniors within Hudson County. The event boasted over 200 volunteers with NJIT MSA proudly being one of them. AngelaCARES was even nice enough to purchase several pies of pizza for the working volunteers. Now, as we all know Thanksgiving is what its name states, a day to give thanks. We as Muslims, and other faiths included, have the ideology of giving thanks every day to God, not just one specified date. In fact, in our daily prayers every Muslim first recites “All praise and Gratitude is due to God…”. We recite these verses from our Holy Book, the Qur’an and what is amazing about this verse is the word used for “praise and gratitude”, Hamd. In the Arabic language Hamd is in the form of a noun as opposed to a verb for the reason that a verb has a tense to it while a noun is timeless. Since we are using “Hamd” we can actually translate it to “All timeless praise and gratitude belongs to God…”. This is interpreted as saying that every moment of our lives is a blessing and so God constantly deserves praise and gratitude for these moments. That day, AngelaCARES helped us be grateful for our blessings and we thank them for that and hope to collaborate again in the near future!