Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev opens his commentary on Parshat Vayera (Genesis 18:1) with a puzzle: the Torah says "God appeared to him," using only the pronoun "him" instead of Abraham's name. Why?
The answer lies in what had just happened. Abraham had been circumcised. Before the circumcision, Abraham served God primarily through love, ahavah (אהבה). But the act of circumcision represented a shift to serving God through yirah (יראה), awe, the total negation of one's earthbound self. By cutting away the foreskin, a symbol of spiritual obstruction called kelipah (קליפה) in Kabbalistic language, Abraham destroyed the barrier between his soul and the divine.
In this moment of transition, Abraham was between identities. His old name, Avram, had already been changed to Avraham. But his new identity, rooted in this deeper mode of service, had not yet fully formed. He was in a state of spiritual flux. The Torah reflects this by referring to him only as "him," a pronoun without a fixed reference, because his very selfhood was being reconstituted.
When the three visitors appeared, the Zohar (I:98) identifies them as "Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob." This sounds paradoxical: how can Abraham meet Abraham? Rabbi Levi Yitzchak explains that Abraham was encountering the spiritual archetypes. Abraham represents chesed (חסד), lovingkindness. Isaac represents gevurah (גבורה), strength and awe. Jacob represents tiferet (תפארת), harmony. By meeting these three, Abraham was integrating all the modes of divine service into himself, preparing for the moment when he would argue with God on behalf of Sodom.
That argument, too, was an act of awe. Abraham, who had just negated his own ego through circumcision, was now standing before God with nothing left to lose, advocating for the wicked. True awe of God does not make a person passive. It makes them fearless on behalf of others.