The new Contemporary Jewish Museum has just opened its doors. It is located in the heart of downtown San Francisco. His $47.5 million building, with its skewed blue-steel structures jutting out of a landmark 19th-century power plant. It will certainly gain attention for the institution.

Like so many other new museums, the Contemporary Jewish Museum is dedicated to a hyphenated American identity. Jews lived in San Francisco from at least its early boom days, when they streamed in with other settlers during the Gold Rush. So their sense of belonging is not tentative; they are comfortably at home in a Western pardes. Judaism is treated more as a culture than a religion.

Right now the Contemporary Jewish Museum celebrates a vision of Judaism as a kind of freewheeling allegory, a pardes of open-mindedness and diversity and artistic enterprise. But for all the institution’s considerable appeal, Judaism’s fundamental, literal meanings — texts and laws and beliefs and history — are left outside the gates of paradise.