So is God conjuring up the bad events or is Satan the one conjuring them up?
my opinion?
God is....
God creates both good and evil...read the bible....
God is both Good and evil...see kabbalah, texts like "treatise on the left emanation"
Treatise on the Left Emanation: Part 1
I have noted your tremendous desire to ascend to the ladder of wisdom and perceive enigmas and grasp the cunning ways of the ancient Sages, the masters of inscriptions, those who expounded upon the secrets of the souls. And having noted that the Lord God, may He be blessed, bestowed upon you an attentive and understanding heart, I have decided with much fondness to answer your question and fulfill your request.
I will do this for you even though you are quite aware that this path was not trod upon except for "two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough" (Isaiah 17:6) -- these are the ancient elders, the scholars of Spain who delved in the palace of Samael. It is a long and deep path and it eludes all masters of wisdom of the hidden emanation, the "depth of good and the depth of evil." (Sefer Yetzirah 1:4) It is known only to those few solitary individuals, "the remnant who the Lord shall call" (Joel 3:5). Moreover, to the best of my ability I will not stray my steps from the path in order to grant your wish and quench a bit of your thirst. May His most beloved assist me in His mercy and Loving kindness.
Satan is of course the self....
Perhaps the greatest book of satan is the Baghavad Gita....
the "hindu" war book outlines the war for the soul, for the self...
Jesus is tempted in the desert, Buddha was tempted by the tree
Satan, the tester came to them....Satan gave them the easy way..the way of power
the way of the self.
Christ and Buddha rejected this....and chose the path of ALL, not the self....
Thus satan is what we place before ourselves and our true selves....
Berfore enlightenment carry water chop wood....
as we progress, we can think of using a chainsaw, building a dam
after enlightenment carry water chop wood
It is in the act of chainsaws, damming water...that we have satan...
satan is the tempter, the one that sees if we are worthy
The greatest battle a person will ever face
Is to overcome themselves
.............
One day during a storm a heavy branch fell onto a little snowdrop plant. Later when the branch was removed the small tender stems, unharmed, were seen to have spread out and curled around as if to embrace the log. Less than an hour later, the little shoots had all but straightened out and, unimpeded, were growing upward toward their fulfillment.
Murshida Sitara Brutnell
It is easy to confuse this principle of keeping within proper bounds with mediocrity, with being neither one thing nor an­other. In reality there is a vast difference. What the Jewish sages recommend is not only a middle way, it is a rejection of ex­tremes in terms of a clear knowledge of how to keep everything, including the extreme, in its proper place. Consequently, in general, there are no preconceptions about what is the correct conduct for all situations, since the correctness of a way of be­ing is itself only measurable in terms of a specific set of circum­stances that may or may not recur. There is therefore no possibility of fixing a single standard of behavior. If anything is clear, it is that a rigid, unchanging way is wrong. Furthermore, this principle of movement, of constant change, is the principle manifested by the soul itself in its life on earth. To be sure, a person needs a special teacher or a great deal of guidance in or­der to be able always to find the right measure; usually choosing the correct way grows out of the souls continual oscillation from one extreme to another. This pendulum swing of experi­ence brings about a certain synthesis somewhere in the mid­dle-although too often it is an artificial middle, merely halfway between good and evil and neither one nor the other.
The 13 petalled rose (Adin Steinsaltz)